Billy Connolly - Biography - IMDb Billy Connolly Biography Showing all 50 items Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (2) | Trade Mark (6) | Trivia (15) | Personal Quotes (22) Overview (4) 6' (1.83 m) Mini Bio (1) Billy Connolly was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. He left school to work in the shipyards becoming a welder and joined the Territorial Army (in the parachute regiment) at around the same time. He developed an interest in folk music, eventually becoming an accomplished banjo player and a member of the band Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty (later of Baker Street fame). The jokes he told between songs eventually took over his act and he became a full-time comedian. Already a big star in Scotland, he became a household name in the UK after appearing on Parkinson (1971) in the early seventies. Billy has released many recordings and videos of his concert performances over the years. He has expanded his repertoire to include acting, appearing in a number of television dramas and films, most recently in the USA.

In the 90s he made two documentary series for the BBC, about Scotland and Australia respectively, and in 1997 he starred in the award winning film Mrs Brown (1997). He is one of the UK's top comedian. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous Spouse (2) ( 20 December 1989 - present) (3 children) Iris Pressagh Tangential storytelling in stand-up comedy performances, often featuring multilayered digressions from original story. Banjo playing Use of bad language in his stand-up routines Long hair Glaswegian accent Trivia (15) Known for his long, messy hair, goatee and lots of bad language in his stand-up show. American audiences are generally unfamiliar with Connolly's musical accomplishments, since he all but eliminated the songs from his act before he became popular in North America. An exception to this were his guest appearances on Pearl (1996) in which he sang one of his old songs, "I Wish I Was in Glasgow", in a duet with Malcolm McDowell .

Three Daughters with Pamela Stephenson : Daisy (born 31 December 1983), Amy (born 7 July 1986) and Scarlett (born 28 July 1988). Two children with his previous wife, Iris Pressagh: Son Jamie (born 1969) and Daughter Cara (born 1973). Married Pamela Stephenson in Fiji on 20 December 1989. July 2001: Received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to Entertainment. He is a long time supporter of Glasgow Celtic Football Club. He is a former reserve soldier in Britain's elite parachute regiment, serving with 15 Para (now a disbanded battalion). In September 2005, he announced that he is returning to live in his native Scotland, after residing in the United States for some years. Diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and Parkinson's Disease [September 16, 2013].

Fulham, London, England [May 2009] Received the Outstanding Contribution to Television and Film Award at the 2012 British Academy Scotland Awards. To date (2016), Billy holds the record for the most guest appearances on the popular British TV talk show Parkinson (1971), with a reported 15 spots. Billy's Parkinson's Disease was initially diagnosed under informal circumstances in that he was approached by a doctor in his L.A. hotel lobby after an appearance on Conan O'Brien's show in 2012. After the doctor introduced himself as a fan, he then remarked that Billy's shuffling gait resembled that of someone with the possible early onset of the disease and advised him to get a medical checkup. In October 2004, during an 18-night stint at London's Hammersmith Apollo, Connolly was criticised for making jokes about the hostage Kenneth Bigley. Shortly after Connolly joked about the future killing of the hostage and touched on the subject of Bigley's young Thai wife, Bigley was beheaded in Iraq. Connolly claims he was misquoted.

He has declined to clarify what he actually said, claiming that the context was as important as the precise words used. Personal Quotes (22) I'm now a Doctor of Letters. Most of them Fs and Bs. Life for me is great. I'm a very f***in' wealthy person, I'm married to a very beautiful woman and I get laid with monotonous regularity. I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be. In Scotland, there is no such thing as bad weather - only the wrong clothes. Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares?... He's a mile away and you've got his shoes! There are two seasons in Scotland - Winter and July. It's very awkward to be kind of big in your own field. It limits what you're offered. People are swayed by the fact that you're a comedian or a musician or whatever they think you are. When it comes to choosing you, they get a bit shaky about offering you a different type of role. But I've really been very lucky. When you compare me to other comedians, I've been very fortunate.

So you'll get no complaints. I'd never consciously left home to see a zombie movie. They were fine by me, but I had no intention of ever being in one. But I've been learning more about it as I've been doing interviews. I didn't even know there were specialist zombie magazines and clubs. I heard the other day that a radio station had asked people if they'd made preparations for an attack by zombies, and a staggering number of people replied yes! I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce -- my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions -- the absurdity of the thing. Without arts programmes there's only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is. Gerry Rafferty was a hugely talented songwriter and singer who will be greatly missed. I was privileged to have spent my formative years working with Gerry and there remained a strong bond of friendship between us that lasted until his untimely death. Gerry had extraordinary gifts and his premature passing deprives the world of a true genius. There comes a point when you don't give a shit what anybody thinks. It doesn't happen all at once, but it's lovely when it does.

Criticism used to worry me before, but I can suddenly write it off. It's too late. I don't have the time to spend thinking about it anymore. I need that time to live with. I fucking hate going on holiday anywhere but in my own home. My idea of a nice break is lying in bed being brought cups of tea while watching football, episodes of Law & Order (1990) or one of those reality shows set in a prison. And it fucking terrifies me to be somewhere where Pamela Stephenson's going to be lurking about waiting to guilt-trip me into going on a walk to Japanese gardens, sampling vanilla tea or trying to stay upright on a contraption that doesn't know if it's a kite or a surfboard. Wild horses couldn't persuade me. If she'd had her way, we'd start the day with an hour of power yoga on the shore, followed by a gluten-free breakfast, a scuba dive to see enormous, bitey things, then a tanning session on the beach where the combination of sunscreen and sand turns you into a giant schnitzel.

After lunch there'd be kayaking to a deserted island, then a candlelit dinner in some exotic outdoor location where small bitey things make you even more miserable than the big ones. Jazz makes me want to vomit! I fucking hate sand. I've had it with terrorists of all colors and fucking descriptions. Fucking bringing terror to some innocent person's life. Fuck you. Osama Bin Laden lives in a cave, shits in a fucking bucket. Why are we scared of this prick? Fuck you, Bin Laden! I don't want to influence anybody so I shut up. I think the Scots will come to a good conclusion in the referendum. They'll get what they deserve. [on the death of Robin Williams ] Robin was 'on' all the time. He was a joy to be around, let me tell you. In all the years I knew him I never got tired of him. He was a one-off, so warm, so human. In my quieter moments I do sometimes think I could have done more to help him. It's a lonely life, show business. You spend a lot of time on your own, and if you dwell on these things you can hurt yourself, as Robin proved.

The future doesn't exist and neither does the past. Worrying about it is a waste of time and effort. [on his belief that Robin Williams was trying to say goodbye when they last spoke] On the last phone call he said, 'I love you like a brother' and I said, 'I know you do' and he said, 'Are you sure you know?' and I said, 'Yes'. Robin worried about everything. [on politicians] Don't vote, it just encourages them. Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time? See also Who is Billy Connolly Dating? | Relationships Girlfriend Wife | FamousHookups.com Billy Connolly is currently married to Pamela Stephenson. He has been in two celebrity relationships averaging approximately 21.6 years each. His two marriages have averaged 21.6 years each. Given Name: William Connolly Billy Connolly: I'd never cheat on my wife Pamela Stephenson | Daily Mail Online comments Happy hippy: Billy Connolly in his trademark boots If you want a slap from Billy Connolly just dare to call him ‘beige’. The tepid colour is, according to Billy, all that is wrong with the world.

Uniformity, caution, Art Deco buildings — all are the type of ‘beige’ things that Billy despises. He may be a 68-year-old grandfather, but he is determined to remain as colourful as ever. The comedian is wearing black and white brogues, yellow, orange and green striped socks, tight black trousers and a denim jacket. His long flowing locks — now a deep tinge of grey — are as unruly as ever. ‘I’m a shoe-y person — my all-time favourites are cowboy boots with the devil getting married,’ he says. ‘I’ve also always loved flashy socks. It’s not because I want to show off. I’m just not beige.’ No, he most certainly is not. Appearances in films such as Mrs Brown may have turned Billy into a national treasure, but his vocabulary is as colourful as a 14-year-old who has discovered swear words. His boisterous enthusiasm could give a manic puppy a run for its money. Billy’s un-beigeness is one reason why he left Britain 20 years ago to live in America. ‘I love the positive attitude to life there, the optimism,’ he says. ‘It’s an attitude that can’t be bought.

Britain is negative, it’s full of s***heads, class system and religious bigots. ‘There is an attitude here that success is a bad thing; you are showing off. In Scotland they call the syndrome “I ken hees feether” — “I knew his father”. It means, how could he possibly be famous when I knew his father. ‘When I first made it big, the TV show Nationwide came to my home town and filmed me in my local sweetshop signing autographs. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share ‘The director of the show and his assistant overheard two little old ladies. “What’s going on over there?” went the conversation. “It’s Billy Connolly doing autographs”. Big sigh: “And his father was such a nice man.” ’ Actually his father, William, an optical instrument technician, wasn’t so nice. Abandoned by his wife when Billy was four, the former soldier regularly sexually abused his son, something the comic only revealed four years ago in a biography written by his wife Pamela Stephenson. My saviour: Billy with his wife Pamela Stephenson.

The pair have been married since 1989 The family were living in a tiny house in Glasgow with his two aunts and two siblings where the young Billy shared a sofa bed with his father. The abuse took place when William had been drinking. Billy has described comedienne-turned-psychologist Pamela as his saviour, who helped him come to terms with his many demons. He says he still loves his father, who died in 1988. He even excuses William’s behaviour — blaming it on the Catholic Church’s refusal to let him divorce his errant wife and remarry. ‘It was disloyal of him to do that to me,’ says Billy. ‘But there were other facets of his character that were great.’ Billy, who trained as a welder, found fame as a folk singer with Gerry Rafferty before going into comedy. There was lots of partying; Billy would drink 30 brandies in a sitting and was also into cocaine. Easy rider: The comedian and actor rode Route 66 by trike, fulfilling a lifelong dream by travelling the world's most famous highway He was an alcoholic by the time he met Pamela in 1979.

She was starring in the hit satire show Not The Nine O’Clock News, and he was making a guest appearance. Both their first marriages had broken down (his to interior designer Iris Pressagh, hers to TV actor Nicholas Ball). But the couple did not get together for a year — and Pamela took him on only if he got clean, telling him: ‘It’s Nancy Whisky or me.’ He’s been a good boy since. They married in 1989, and even now, Billy’s features soften when he talks about his wife of 22 years, particularly his pride in her Strictly Come Dancing success last year. ‘She was spectacular on Strictly,’ he grins. ‘She still dances — just last night I went with her to a class for the tango. I was so happy for her success in Strictly. I was truly joyous in my heart because it was doing her ego such good. ‘She had spent all that time being a mother and then being a shrink which isn’t exactly joy-filled. So to be back in the spotlight, doing her thing and doing it extremely well; it was remarkable. The show has given Pamela her confidence back.

‘She’s going to be on The One Show [a source there says she’s in talks for a reporter-style role] and she swam the Irish Sea with Ronan Keating for charity this week. All of it has come from Strictly. I have to make an appointment just to see her now.’ So close: Billy says the secret to their marriage is to 'leave each other alone' It’s refreshing to see a showbusiness couple who still seem so close after two decades together — they have five children between them. Billy says their secret is to ‘leave each other alone’. Let a person remain themselves,’ he says. ‘There is an attitude that when you are married you have to become this one thing and stop being two people. It doesn’t work that way. ‘There is nothing weird about going fishing — let him go fishing. There is nothing weird about ballroom dancing — let her dance. Just because guys are doing tango with your wife doesn’t mean they are a threat — let her go.’ I ask him exactly how far he is prepared to let go. In an interview with the Mail in June Pamela admitted she was not sure that Billy had been faithful — but had been afraid to ask him.

‘We can’t pretend just because we’re married to somebody we’re not going to be attracted to other people,’ she said. ‘I don’t ask about other women and I don’t care. I think monogamy’s hard for anybody. If you spend a lot of time apart and you suspect your partner might occasionally dabble, isn’t your priority to make sure he’s being sexual with someone he’s safe with?’ So has he always been faithful? ‘Och, Jesus, of course I have,’ he says, his face dropping at the thought that his wife might doubt him. ‘Yes, I’m a guy in showbusiness, doing tours all over the world. I might meet women from time to time — fanciable people — but I’m all right.’ For his latest venture he was away from Pamela for two months living out a childhood dream of travelling Route 66, the 2,278-mile road from Chicago to Santa Monica in Los Angeles. The road is part of American culture — the route for struggling farmers to escape poverty for California immortalised in books such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath or for former slaves to escape up North to Chicago.

It’s been glamorised in songs such as Chuck Berry’s (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66, Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road and in the modern Pixar movie Cars. This was a nostalgic visit for the still hippyish Billy who did the journey on a large trike. ‘I wanted to reconnect with old small-town America,’ he says. ‘Like a lot of Britain, much of it has been smothered under a beige blanket of franchised coffee shops, fast food palaces, faceless shopping malls and edge-of-town superstores. I wanted to show the Americana of your dreams and the absurdity of it.’ He had a wonderful adventure, meeting an Amish furniture maker with a heartbreaking story, a Nazi memorabilia collector, the victims of a hurricane and native Americans. He also found a ghost town which had just one woman inhabitant. But there were disappointments. Route 66 had its lifeblood sucked out of it when the Interstate highway was opened. Many of its towns withered and died. Others turned beige. ‘I first went to America in 1970,’ he says. ‘They had big cars with fins, cowboy boots, juke boxes and pink guitars.

But now they have kind of given all of that away. They have allowed people to tell them it is bad taste. They think the French or Japanese have good taste. Who said that? When did that happen? ‘Now everyone has the same-coloured cars. Some of those towns are just beige. Even the empty towns are better than the beige ones where people are sitting around looking at the walls. ‘Another time we filmed at an Art Deco gas station turned into a restaurant. I hated it, I hate Art Deco. I just want to slap the kind of people who like Art Deco.’ Export: Billy says he loves the optimism of America The journey is an undertaking for a man approaching his 70s. But Billy appears to be as tireless as ever. The only time he had to stop was when he had an accident on the trike which almost derailed the whole journey. ‘I had just revved up the engine after a stop at a souvenir shop — I’m collecting badges and key rings for my grandchildren — when the road suddenly ended with an upward step and a fence which you had to go around,’ he recalls.

‘As I tried to round the bend, the trike came over on top of me, breaking my rib, hurting my fingers and knee.’ He was taken by air ambulance to hospital, after first instructing the medics to only cut his leather jacket along the seams — and he was back in the saddle within four days. Billy is currently playing an ageing opera singer in a film with Dustin Hoffman, and ITV bosses are working on new shows for him — he has also covered the UK and the Arctic for them. All the shows are unscripted, and Billy’s boyish enthusiasm shines through, as does his infectious humour — he spends much of the time laughing at his own jokes. He knows that is breaking the rules. ‘The show’s got mistakes,’ he says. ‘I laugh too much — some people disapprove of that. I don’t care — I still think it’s better than anyone else’s show. It’s got guts. ‘It’s the same with stand-up comedy. People will try to tell you that there is a line that must not be crossed. Well I think lines are there to be jumped over and I have always felt like that.’ Grandpa Billy says he will never change.

‘I will never grow up,’ he says defiantly. ‘Grow old by all means, but never grow up. Growing up is always somebody else’s idea. “You have some growing up to do, boy,” I was told my whole life. These guys say they know all about the real world. ‘They have a lake of common sense outside their place. What they mean is, it’s time you got beige. It’s time you wore a cardigan because they’re jealous of the f****** jeans you’re wearing. Well, it won’t happen.’ n Billy Connolly’s Route 66 is on ITV1 on September 15 at 9pm. The series will be accompanied by a book and a CD of Route 66-inspired songs. Billy Connolly: The interview | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close It's hard to think of Billy Connolly silent. Harder still - alarming, even - to think of him silent in a flotation tank: alone with all those stories and all that hair.

But some years ago he booked himself a session for the hell of it, or because he lived in California, or because his wife told him to, and after half an hour in the mineral bath, naked in the blackness, listening to piped whale noises and his beating heart, he had a sense there was someone else floating there next to him. It took him a moment to realise, he says, wild-eyed, that the someone was just a voice in his head. And then that it was a voice he'd heard often before. The voice was responding to the little plans he was making, the daydreams he was drifting into and it was saying, ' No, you'll never do that. No, you're not good enough, not clever enough, you'll never go there .' It was a voice, he says, that sounded just like the aunt who brought him up by beating him up, the teachers who always called him thick. Perhaps even of the mother who abandoned him at the age of three and the father who sexually abused him for five years from when he was 10.

He jokes about it now but he believes, too, that voice will never really leave him; he sees his life as a series of different strategies for learning to live with it. Not least of these was the tried-and-tested one he employed in the tank itself: 'Away with you!' he yelled. ' Fuck off! ' I heard Connolly tell this story on stage in Dublin a couple of weeks ago. The following morning he repeated a more thoughtful version of it to me in our interview. He explained how he could laugh about what his wife, Pamela Stephenson, now a Hollywood psychologist, calls his 'abandonment issues' - he loves the phrase - partly because he felt he had finally got those issues under control. The flotation tank was just a tiny part of the therapy which he has put himself through since his father died in 1989, in a bid to lay his demons to rest. The process has been 'like someone telling you there's no such thing as ghosts, and you can go to sleep,' he says. 'And you realise you must never make decisions in your life based on that negative voice in your head. And also that so many people do just that.

You must always instead go with your primary thought, your hopeful thought. And that's what I try to do.' Living by hopeful thoughts has made Connolly who he is today, and that person is far removed from the little boy lost who survived a disturbing childhood in a Glasgow tenement; it is a considerable way, too, from the banjo-playing storyteller who first made his name in the city's folk clubs and came to London to meet Parky. Sixty next year, with a pink goatee and rattleskin boots, a Beverly Hills mansion and an estate in Aberdeenshire, Connolly has the evangelical aura of a man who has escaped his fate, and he is justifiably pleased with himself for it. He speaks, with only a little irony, of Buddhist meditation as one of the joys of his new life and, laughing, of how Shirley MacLaine came up to him recently after a show to tell him how 'centred' he was. By rights, he might have been a sadder figure, drunk and embittered by the sins of his father and mother, but he never really fancied martyrdom.

His early stage act, he says, was one way of escaping from 'my life, from my house, from my background', making of himself the 'Big Yin' (the name he originally applied to Christ in his wonderful Glaswegian version of the Last Supper). Since he met Pamela Stephenson, he has found new ways of sorting things out. If you were to blank out the cynical voices in your own head, you might see 'Pamela and Billy in Hollywood' as one of the great love stories of our time. The pair met when Connolly was still a spectacular drinker, an unreconstructed spinner of wild tales, a wearer of banana-shaped wellies. He was married, badly, to Iris, who he'd met while he was a welder in the Clydeside shipyards. He had two children, a son and a daughter, 'but emotionally, physically,' he says, 'our whole lives had fallen to bits.' He was on the road much of the time, but was never very good at picking up women. He could make them laugh, but he never worked out the signals: 'I never knew when to make a move.

I'd end up laughing with them all night and find out we'd become friends, which I didn't particularly want. I mean, I had lots of friends already.' It was the same story initially with Stephenson, who he met when she interviewed him wearing a set of Janet Street-Porter teeth for Not The Nine O'Clock News. 'The thing between us was immediately apparent to her,' he recalls. 'But I took a lot of convincing.' Finally, though, it became 'hot and heavy' and he walked out of his first marriage and, eventually, his first life, after a long custody battle, taking his two children with him - and, over the years, adding three more daughters with Stephenson. In many ways, you guess, his second wife was the first person who ever really got through to him. Connolly talks about himself as being on 'permanent transmit', never having quite mastered 'receive' - Stephenson puts it down to Attention Deficit Disorder - and, to prove the point, all the while he is talking, smiling, laughing at his own jokes, his eyes are darting about your face as if anxiously looking for clues.

I wonder when he became aware of his new wife's 12-step plan to put his life on track. 'I don't know,' he says, tickled by the idea. 'I mean she was very subtle about it, just my pal, really. Don't get me wrong, Iris was a very nice woman, but this was, from the outset, a different kind of relationship. With Pam, I discovered that you could not get away with anything. Could not get away from her intelligence. There were always so many whys going on. And I thought, Oh God , you know. I had to own up to everything, which no one had ever asked me to do before.' Once Connolly started being honest with his wife, he found, too, he believes, that he could be honest with himself. 'And then it all tumbled out,' he explains. 'I'd always been open to change, and she showed me how I might go about that.' The ways in which he went about it are the subject of Pamela's Stephenson's book, Billy, which is an engaging mix of biography and case study. For Connolly, the book was partly prompted by a desire to put the record straight.

He's been smarting ever since an unauthorised life by Jonathan Margolis ('all based on press cuttings,' he says, 'from generations of Scottish journalists who were only too happy to weary willie about me') came out, and he's been wanting ever since to get his side across. Mostly, though, he says, 'it was incredibly good for Pam, because she was dying to do this wee shrinky look at me'. And how did he feel about that, being on his wife's couch? 'Oh, I loved it,' he says, laughing. 'I'm a work in progress, me.' The things that tumbled out from Connolly for his wife to analyse were the stories of his childhood, some of which he'd hinted at on stage, many of which he'd kept to himself. He was born in 1942 and, soon after, his father went away to Burma in the war. When he was three and his sister, Florence, was five, his mother, long unable to cope, simply locked the door on her children and walked out, never to return.

After some time - perhaps days - fending for themselves, the children's crying was heard by neighbours, and eventually they were taken in by their father's sisters, Mona and Margaret. Mona in particular, who was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric home, physically and verbally attacked Billy from the outset. When Connolly's father returned from the war to the live in the overcrowded flat, he came home drunk most nights to share a sofabed with his son. For a period of around five years, Connolly says, his father, a fierce Catholic, 'interfered with him' - a secret he did not share with anyone until the day of his father's death, when he broke down and told his wife. In her book, Stephenson sets these facts down sympathetically and draws more general truths from them. The book is dedicated 'To the Connolly and McLean families in the spirit of healing through understanding; and to all families who are divided by religious differences, or who struggle with poverty, abuse or addiction.' At times, as the publisher might say, it reads like Frank McCourt meets Dave Pelzer and becomes a superstar comedian. So what was the process of writing it, I wonder?

'We just talked and talked and talked.' How far back could he remember? Did he recall the day his mother walked out? 'I don't remember that moment, no,' he says. 'But I remember being in the house. I remember there being no adult in the house and trying to get by with my sister - you know, trying to keep warm, eating sweeties and all that.' Some of the most moving parts of the book are the occasions, in his teens and later, when Connolly tracked down his mother, and went to see her in her new life in the Glasgow suburb of Dunoon, where she had settled down and started another family. The meetings left him feeling nothing. 'I really tried to have a relationship of some kind with her,' he says, thinking back, 'but we were always embarrassed with each other. I thought I would love her, I suppose. I invested so much in that. But it was a stupid, ridiculous thing to think. Society tells you mother love never goes away, blah, blah, blah. But it does, of course. When we met, I didn't feel any bond with her, and she didn't seem to feel one towards me.

She was a nice enough woman, though...' Oddly, Pamela Stephenson shares a birthday with Connolly's mother. It's too tempting to think that he found a direct replacement in her, but he resists the idea, even if she phones him up just before our interview to chide him for smoking. A large Cuban cigar lies in its case on the table. He likens their relationship instead to being more like that of great girlfriends. 'It's a bit like one of those very long, very intense female friendships sustained through the length of a huge novel or something,' he says. His mother, he believes, liked Stephenson: his wife's middle-class assurance allowed her to pitch into his repressed family and try to heal old wounds. 'In fact,' he says, 'I think she liked Pamela more than me. I guess she always found me to be a nuisance, coming out the wilderness.' He throws his head back, laughing. 'My mum wrote me a letter once - hilarious, though she didn't mean it to be.

She said [he does his crimped women's voice], "Will you stop telling the truth about your age because I've been lying about mine all these years." She meant it, too.' When Connolly's mother was dying, he went to see her, but when he got near the house, he felt he couldn't go through with it and turned back. He tells me that his stepsister later said to him at the funeral, 'I hear you were in Dunoon.' He adds: 'Some shopkeeper had told her. And she said that my mother knew I was there. At one point she'd sat up in bed and said, "Billy's here, Billy's coming," or something, apparently.' He pauses, thinks about this scene for a moment. 'So that's extraordinary, I guess.' The final edit of the book was Stephenson's. His wife, of course, looked for what Connolly calls all that 'from the dark to the light business'. She prefaces the book with a quote from Nietzsche: 'He must have chaos within him who would give birth to a dancing star.' How anxious is he, I wonder, about bringing some of the darker stuff out into the public for the first time?

'Well, if you are going to do a book about your life, you have to include in it the things that made you what you are. There's nothing particularly joyful or liberating about it. I found it painful to talk about. And then there's the thing about disloyalty. About my father. Because I knew some of the family would take it badly.' And have they? 'Not yet, but I think they will.' He's talked it through with his sister Florence, his 'great defender', with whom he retains a strong bond. He's not quite so close to his younger 'brother' Michael, Mona's son, and he worries a little that he will have problems with the book. 'I explained to him about my father,' he says. 'He had no idea. I had to do it on the telephone in the end. I went to his house to say it, but I couldn't get the words out. He wants to see me and talk to me, and I think he'll be fine with it. We're both Celtic supporters and he's a lefty, like me, and a good guy. I hope he'll understand... Anyway, I don't mind the truth. There's a certain ring to it.

And people learn to live with it, whatever it is, however hurtful. I've no worries about it.' Why didn't he confront his father with this truth while he was alive? 'I suppose that's biggest disappointment of my life,' he says. 'It was partly because he was very sick towards the end of his life. But also, apparently, it's typical of guys who went through what I did. It's like alcoholics - they are the same all over the world. So are victims of this kind of behaviour. They all say, "I wish I'd confronted him."' Instead, he ran through endless scenarios of what he might have said. Did he get to the point in his own mind where he could forgive his father? 'I have no lack of love for my father. I love his memory now, as much as I loved him when he was alive. It was disloyal of him to do that to me. But there were other facets of his character that were great. So you know, you've got to get over it, you've only one life to do it.

But still, I kept thinking, if I'm still troubled by this, if I'm still carrying it around like a big rucksack full of bricks and my father's dead, I need someone to tell me how to get rid of this great weight, you know.' Connolly had spent his life and his career being cynical about the kind of people who had therapy, and the kind of people who became therapists. People used to tell him about Dudley Moore, how he lived in Hollywood and spent all his money on shrinks, and he'd go: 'For God's sake! What's wrong with you? You know, you're funny - get on with it!' But now he speaks with the zeal of the converted. 'A friend of mine was seeing this guy,' he says, 'and Pam just said, "Why don't you go along?" And the first time, it was amazing. I felt so great. Then, after about eight weeks or so, I told him that I found myself trying to think up things to tell him on the way in the car. To make it a bit more interesting.

He stood up and said, "You're cured!" And we had a laugh, then stopped it.' There must have been a fear, I suggest, that once he knew his demons, some of the things that made him who he was, he'd stop being funny. He likens the process to giving up alcohol: he hasn't touched a drop for 15 years. 'It's like you have to have faith that you are funny first, and then you're drunk,' he says. 'I thought the two would be linked and I was scared. But actually I felt fitter and I thought I was better on stage after I'd stopped drinking. So I started doing other things, too. I stopped smoking and I stopped eating meat. And all of a sudden I became this other guy. I disappeared. I had this 30-inch waist. I have a picture at home and I have a leather suit on and my face is all sunk in, and I look like a cadaver. I thought, "God! Eat something! Chew something!" And I've just gradually got back to my own shape.

But it's a good thing to know you can change.' This literal shape-shifting was, in many ways, the beginning of the end for Connolly and Scotland, or at least for him and the Glasgow tabloids, which have waged a curious 20-year war against him for, well, shaving off his beard, moving to California, making money, not being a welder, becoming teetotal, dining with royalty, marrying a shrink, not being who they thought he was. It's mostly lost-leader syndrome. In many ways, Connolly invented or allowed a new kind of Scottishness, destroyed the shortbread-tin images: it's harder to imagine James Kelman, say, or Trainspotting without him setting the ground rules. But he's hated by some now for having escaped that life; and he hates the Scottish press for judging him, for running front-page stories about his missing mum on Mother's Day, for telling him how he should live. He had, as Stephenson points out, already had more than enough people doing that for him by the time he was in his teens. When I mention the stand-off, Connolly looks wearied by it.

'I left Scotland because it was time for me to leave in millions of ways,' he says. 'I outgrew it, or at least I outgrew the media. It was becoming very uncomfortable for me. The negativity there felt like a disease, you know.' He initially went to Hollywood to launch his film career, a career which stuttered before taking off spectacularly with the British-made Mrs Brown (Dustin Hoffman called Connolly's acting, alongside Judy Dench, 'the most exciting male performance of that year'). His forthcoming movie, which premiered in Edinburgh, is a sub- Billy Elliot piece called Gabriel and Me. It tells the story of a family on Tyneside in which the father, unemployed and dying of cancer, takes all his frustrations out on his son. The son (it's slightly better than it sounds) writes to the Angel Gabriel (played by Connolly) to see if he can join up with the celestial host. It was the childhood dream of getting above it all, flying above the city looking down, that I imagine struck a chord with Connolly. 'Aye,' he says. 'It was a bit like that for me. That's what I liked about that movie.

I hate my country for the way it holds people back, tells them they're not good enough. I hate the tabloid press for what it does to people. Never letting them be intelligent.' He pauses, catches himself, smiles. 'I hate all those weathermen, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing .' He laughs, and he's away, doing what he does best. 'It's not just Scotland, it's all of Britain: this negativity. You can see it in the obsession with so-called reality TV. It's donkeys watching fucking donkeys. It's full of people who think you get bright by going to a gym. You know, we seem to have become a country where the highest ambition is to become a fucking television presenter or, worse, a children's television presenter. People who know so much about children that they think they like being shouted at. All those ninnies! Autocue comedians, wearing glasses to look intelligent. I hate it, loathe it.' He could go on, of course, and you'd like to let him. Connolly rants, anger consumes him but the smile never quite leaves his face.

More than the therapy, it is this, of course, that has kept him sane over the years. And it is his rage, lovable and funny, that still makes his stage show a wonder. The previous night, this anger had been directed for two-and-a-half hours without a break at paedophile Catholic priests ('Who do they think they are - Michael Jackson?') and miniature pedigree dogs, begging letters and unionists, teachers and aromatherapists. Billy Connolly has never told jokes, he has just let off steam, and has enjoyed fabulously the process of doing it. Talking about the source of his humour, he says: 'I don't know why I'm funny. But there are reasons for my attitudes. People ask me all the time, "Why are you still angry when you're loaded?" And I don't know. But I like my anger. I've always found it comforting.' He talks of his stage show in this way as if it were his oldest friend. He used to think he might get the same feeling from films or TV or America, but he seems to have lost a bit of that ambition.

He never writes a word of his comedy down and he can, by all accounts, do a run of nights in which he doesn't mention the same thing twice. 'Daisy, my daughter, when she was small, once said I was a "comedium" and I like that, because you don't know where this shit's coming from, you just follow it,' he says. 'I just have lists that say things like "gay mardi gras" or "small dogs". It's all on a sheet of foolscap.' That piece of paper is the crib sheet to his life's work, a formidable and organic confessional monologue. It is, too - as he well knows - Billy Connolly's one sure survival strategy: his way of always making sure he's had the last laugh. Stand-up and be counted Four fellow jokers on why the Big Yin is still king of the comedy pack Eddie Izzard Billy Connolly is the Moses of comedy who had Ten Commandments - each one being 'Thou shalt be very fucking funny.' He helped stand-ups in the UK and Ireland find their own voice, as opposed to being totally influenced by American comics.

He was about 10 to 15 years ahead of the scene in the UK. He influenced me hugely and I loved both his style of chatting personally to 2,000 people and of acting out scenes from stories. He was the first alternative stand-up comedian before there was a 'scene'. There was no one like him. He was playing characters on stage, ad-libbing and changing his material every time you saw him. I remember falling about on the floor watching Billy doing 'the incontinence knickers' sketch. It was part of a larger piece about Sunday newspapers and the weird adverts they run for useless items. When he applied the idea of incontinence knickers to a 'trendy guy', and then mimed him tying drawstrings around the legs of the knickers, it became absolutely killingly funny. Jack Dee Billy is that very rare person who, on stage, can create an atmosphere of laughter around him. He has a complete honesty about him and a fluency in comedy that makes the audience believe that he can translate anything into laughter for them. The more comedians you see the more you understand what a rare gift that is.

Most British comedians take themselves terribly seriously, which suggests that they've failed to learn one of Connolly's greatest charms - his absolute refusal to do so. I remember seeing him on the Parkinson Show in the 70s and other odd clips from the telly of him in his banana shoes. I think his shampoo sketch was the most memorable: 'What's jojoba? Where I'm from that's the month before November.' I've never met Billy Connolly, but once, while shopping with my wife, I put aside a tie-dyed scarf that I liked. Then Connolly came in, tried on the scarf and said that he'd buy it. The shop owner said it was already spoken for and so Connolly left. Although it was far more expensive than I had thought, I bought it anyway because Billy Connolly had wanted it. Fiona Allen I remember watching Billy Connolly as a kid, and being totally bemused by his clothes and hair - I thought he was a mime artist or something. I loved his sketch about somebody knitting a balaclava for him, and him squinting because the eyeholes were in the wrong place! I laughed out loud and it made my belly ache.

I was once introduced to him by a very boring guy at a party in Los Angeles. I never actually spoke to Billy but was lumbered all night with the boring guy. I was really disappointed. I'm not a believer in people standing up on stage and copying other people and, anyway, nobody could ever imitate Billy Connolly. Despite his dreadful dress sense, he is brilliantly funny. Patrick Kielty When I was 14 or 15 my dad and I listened to a tape of Billy Connolly and for the first time we both actually got the same joke. The sketch was about how 'women demand things - more of this and not half as much of that - and whenever you've met all their demands they'll fucking run away, so stay awake!' Me and dad found this so hilarious that the swearing was overlooked. Connolly has that ability to swear in a very ingratiating way - it's never aggressive and always done with a twinkle in his eye. Whereas lots of comedians go out on stage with set material and then go off on a tangent from time to time, Billy has a back catalogue so vast and a memory so good that he can be different every night.

But it's his storytelling that places him above all other comedians. Connolly is not afraid to do the old-fashioned jokes sometimes, but he'll tell it like it's some personal life experience of his. I've seen him live a few times and remain in awe of him. He taught me that you can say literally anything you want to so long as you smile. Emma Pomfreet Pamela Stephenson - Biography - IMDb Pamela Stephenson Jump to: Overview (2) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (2) | Trivia (5) | Personal Quotes (3) Overview (2) Pamela Helen Stephenson Mini Bio (1) Pamela Stephenson was born on December 4, 1949 in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand as Pamela Helen Stephenson. She is an actress and writer, known for Superman III (1983), History of the World: Part I (1981) and Ryan (1973). She has been married to Billy Connolly since December 20, 1989. They have three children. She was previously married to Nicholas Ball . Spouse (2) Married to Scottish actor/comedian Billy Connolly .

Three children with Connolly: Daisy (b. 1983), Amy (b. 1986), Scarlett (b. 1988). Married Billy Connolly in Fiji on 20 December 1989. Sister, Leslie Stephenson, is an opera singer in Switzerland. Has since retired from acting and obtained a doctorate in Psychology. Personal Quotes (3) Billy Connolly hates my "Brazilian hooker" beach look. Port Louis [in Mauritius] turned out to be a sizable city boasting a new colonial-style shopping centre on the old quay. We strolled into the Blue Penny Museum, which had some fascinating old photographs of the early days of European settlement in Mauritius. And then it was back to the hotel for one last secluded, starlit dinner. This was a rare occasion of outdoor privacy for us, and it almost brought out the inner Romeo in my pale-blue Scottish person. There was no jazz to complain about, only the lapping of the Indian Ocean and a warm sea breeze, eliminating the mosquito threat. It was a sweet finale to a surprisingly lovely break.

[In 2013] My great, great grandfather Samuel Stephenson had built a ship here - the "Rosalie" - at the beginning of the 19th century, just after the British forces won Mauritius (then called Isle de France) from the French. He sailed her to what were then the Dutch East Indies and ran opium to China, before running aground near Bali and falling foul of pirates. I took a trip about an hour south of the hotel to check out Ville Noire near Mahébourg, where ships were once built. Traversing the old bridge, I was thrilled finally to see Captain Stephenson's old stomping ground. Those early European sailors had founded a nicely sheltered shipping base here. I imagined Samuel walking across that same bridge of Ville Noire, in the taverns, and even feasting on dodo. See also Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson | Married Divorced Children Ex | FamousHookups.com Check out our New "Top 10 Newest Celebrity Moms" Relationship Information, Quotes, and Trivia Where and/or how did Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson meet?

Pamela Stephenson tells of the day she thought husband Billy Connelly, might die | Daily Mail Online comments When Billy Connolly was still reeling from the bombshell double diagnosis - both on the same day that he had prostate cancer and Parkinson's, he privately wondered whether it was time to give up his comedy and acting career. But when he confided his thoughts to his wife, Pamela Stephenson, she lost no time in talking him out of it. 'It would have been really bad for him to burrow away and not want to come out of his hole,' she says now. Billy received a bombshell diagnosis of Parkinson's and Prostate cancer earlier this year that shook his world 'So I told him, "Look, I'll support you 100 per cent if you want to do that, but I'm not sure you'll love your life if you do, because you're happiest when you're performing." It was the right thing to say to him, and I pushed him into doing some concerts. He's bounced back better than almost anyone could and he's doing really well.' RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share This is the first time she's talked about the emotional effect Billy's illness has had on their close-knit family.

They have three daughters together, Daisy, Amy and Scarlett, and Billy has a son Jamie and a daughter Cara by his first marriage. It started when Billy began having the odd memory loss – searching for words – and he was also having trouble hearing, but he shrugged these symptoms off for months. But when Pam finally persuaded him to see a doctor last September, it proved to be what he later described as 'a funny week'. On the Monday he was prescribed a hearing aid. On the Tuesday he was given pills for a touch of heartburn. And on Wednesday he was told he had Parkinson's – but only after an earlier call to say that a routine check-up had shown he had prostate cancer. Pamela with Mel Smith, Rowen Atkinson and Griff Rhys Jones in Not The Nine O'Clock News in 1980 'He had all these diagnoses in one go because he'd ignored the symptoms and refused to go to the doctor,' she explains. 'It was the hearing loss that worried me the most at that early stage. He was a nightmare, with me saying, "Billy, you've got to get a check-up," and him saying, "Get off my back." And of course he was on tour a lot at the time.

Finally he had some time off and I dragged him kicking and screaming to the doctor.' Pamela recalls the moment he got the dreaded phone call at the couple's home in New York. 'I was physically holding onto him at that point to reassure him and support him. That's what marriage is about: you have your ups and downs and you have to see each other through them. I also understand the psychology of illness, and I knew it was not going to be easy on me either. Let's face it, he was a terrible patient!' she says ruefully. 'But you can't blame someone for that when they're going through something that you're not.' As a result Pamela has felt the need to be the family rock on whom everyone could lean. 'It was important to be strong for Billy and our family, very much so.' Yet even her background in clinical psychology didn't make it any easier for her to look into the treatment when it was so close to home in her husband's case. 'It's sort of scary and you fall into the trap of seeing horrible things that you don't want to read,' she admits.

Billy and Pamela Stephenson, after the birth of their third child, Scarlett Connolly, 1988 'That's all you see at first; then you have to take a deep breath and go back and read it again and pick out the positive things. 'I knew the hearing loss in particular was affecting his ability to perform on stage because he couldn't hear the audience feedback, which is important for a comedian. All those years on the circuit sitting on huge stacks of loudspeakers was bound to cause some damage. So persuading Billy to wear a hearing aid was more of a hurdle than anything else. It made a tremendous difference to his quality of life and he's been performing better than he has for years.' By October, Billy's prostate had been surgically removed and he was given the all-clear. He was told his Parkinson's was a mild, slow-moving form, and no medication was needed. But, Pamela now reveals, the crisis wasn't over: after the prostate operation he developed a life-threatening blood clot on his upper thigh that at first his medical team failed to spot. 'I knew it was a clot but the doctors weren't listening to me,' she says.

'Eventually I spoke to an intern on the phone, who said, "Just get him to the hospital right away!" I threw him into a taxi; he was in agony and crying with pain as the driver drove up the highway from our home. The road was in a very bad condition, so the taxi was bumping over it, and Billy was saying, "Uh-oh, he drives just like you, Pamsy!" I said, "Billy, I'm saving your life here, stop going on about my driving!" Even though he was going through so much pain, he never stopped being his hilarious, curmudgeonly, adorable self. Fortunately I don't take it personally; I just think it's funny that he'd choose that moment to run down my driving.' The hospital dealt with the clot and he was discharged. But soon after, when he was back at work and filming his ITV documentary about how we deal with death, Billy Connolly's Big Send-Off, which was aired in May, Pamela says the blood clot was still a problem. Luckily their middle daughter Amy, 28, had been invited to work as a researcher on the show. 'Thank God Amy was with him.

She recognised what was happening and they got him back to hospital to deal with the clot. He's had all his check-ups and he's in great shape now.' She describes herself as 'a glass half-full person, while Billy's a bit the other way, so we have a good balance. The Parkinson's is mild but Billy still worries about it,' she admits. 'It's actually bigger in his mind than it is in reality; he's always watching for symptoms.' Pamela Stephenson at the Comic Strip - a late-night club that young comedians Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders Pamela says she isn't nostalgic of her days at the Comic Strip as she says that it was a competitive industry Now she jokes that at least all her wifely efforts have 'saved' Billy for his bed scene with Shirley MacLaine in the movie Wild Oats. It's currently being filmed on Gran Canaria and Shirley is the one sowing the wild oats with silver fox Billy.

'He sent me an email about his scene with Shirley – and also mentioned in passing that Demi Moore, his other co-star in the film, is even more beautiful than before Ashton Kutcher left her! But Billy had a bed scene with Sharon Stone too in Beautiful Joe back in 2000, so I'm fairly used to him jumping into bed with other women – on screen of course,' Pamela laughs. 'Am I ever jealous? Of course, humans always get jealous; if your husband is going off to do a movie with Sharon Stone and there's a bedroom scene in it, you think, "Hmm, you'd better behave yourself, boyo." Just because you're married it doesn't mean you're not going to be attracted to other people – and hopefully you can talk about that. It's what you do with that attraction that's important. But it would be much harder for a spouse who hadn't been in the business, who didn't understand acting and how things are.' New Zealand-born Pamela first burst onto the British comedy scene in 1979 in ground-breaking BBC2 sketch show Not The 9 O'Clock News alongside Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.

She went on to join the Comic Strip, a late-night club that young comedians Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders set up in 1980. The Comic Strip transferred to TV for Channel 4's launch night in 1982. Pamela with Billy in July 1983 But Pamela grew disillusioned with the comedy scene and headed in a different direction. She made her West End debut in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates Of Penzance instead, pursued a Hollywood career in which she became the only girl to sleep with Clark Kent's alter ego in Superman III, and joined US comedy show Saturday Night Live but left after one series because of its drug-taking culture at that time. These days Pamela doesn't look back nostalgically at her Comic Strip days. She's saddened by the shock news of Rik Mayall's death at 56, but says she barely got to know him on the few occasions where they appeared on the same stage; in that competitive environment, she recalls, friendships just didn't flourish.

'Doing stand-up was like a war with everyone playing this game of "I can be funnier than you." You had to come in like a boxer with lots of chutzpah and try to scare the pants off people. I remember envying Rik and the other boys for being guys, because the Comic Strip was really hard: I was one of the few women doing it and the audience sounded like they were out for blood, so the boys would take their trousers down on stage and other stuff that I couldn't possibly do.' As for the very few females on stage, it seems there was precious little solidarity there either. 'French and Saunders said mean things about me so I didn't want to talk to them. I don't remember exactly what they said, and it's all water under the bridge now, but I can understand why – because we were all fighting for space and at each other's throats,' explains Pamela. She retrained as a clinical psychologist in California, using her knowledge of showbusiness to write her thesis on the harmful effects of fame, and later presented TV show Shrink Rap, a series of probing psychological interviews with Hollywood stars such as Tony Curtis and Robin Williams.

'Billy was so proud of me getting my doctorate; he said he liked the atmosphere of calm study that I brought to the house. Of course he also meant, "As opposed to when you were a comedian and tearing around like a crazy person!" Frankly it was hard to have two comedians in the house.' But showbusiness is still in her blood. In 2010, at the age of 61, she triumphed against all the ageist odds by reaching the final of Strictly Come Dancing, which turned her into the poster girl for the sexy older lady but left her with unfinished dance business. 'I never got to perform my tango in the final!' she mock-wails. Hence her new project: the world premiere at next month's Edinburgh Festival of her 75-minute Brazilian dance-drama Brazouka, which she wrote and is co-producing with Arlene Phillips – who she met through Strictly – as choreographer.

'Doing stand-up was like a war with everyone playing this game of "I can be funnier than you." I was one of the few women doing it and the audience sounded like they were out for blood, so the boys would take their trousers down on stage and other stuff that I couldn't possibly do.' Brazouka celebrates the Afro-Brazilian dance of lambazouk. She predicts it's going to be bigger than salsa because it's the one dance where women can ask men to dance without losing face. 'It's sensual and fun without being sleazy because it's not a meat-market dance – and it's so brilliant for women of all ages and sizes,' says Pamela, very conscious that she's put a few pounds back on since losing 2st on Strictly. It's 33 years since she was last at Edinburgh, doing a stand-up comedy routine in 1981, and Pamela, now 64, is nervous about taking a new show to the world's biggest arts festival. Yet, after all that's happened with Billy's illnesses recently, she admits she really needs some Latin American fun in her life. 'I discovered on Strictly that dancing could turn around the way I was feeling.

You go through awful things and then something like dance helps you reconnect with the joy of life,' she says. 'And Billy thinks my show's amazing too. He calls the male members of the cast my "Brylcreem Lotharios"! I'll probably practise psychology again at some point, but basically I was sitting on my a*** after Strictly, and my body needed to move.' Although she isn't officially performing in Brazouka, bar a surprise appearance somewhere in the evening, you can't keep a good Strictly star down. And she's even thought of a role for Shirley MacLaine. 'Billy's coming to see Brazouka – maybe he and Shirley can do their bedroom scene in the middle of Princes Street to help promote the show,' she jokes. Brazouka, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, 31 July-25 August, 5.30pm. 0131 623 3030.

Question: Which ex-comic is married to Billy Connolly?
Answer: Pamela Stephenson